Since the merchandise service life decreases recently due to a variety of merchandise items, and customization service orientation of consumers who use the Internet strengthens, the necessity of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has received a great deal of attention. These methods aim at increasing the customer satisfaction and winning and networking new customers.
The one-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing. Personal attribute information such as the age, sex, hobby, taste, and purchase log of each customer is stored as a database. The contents of the information are analyzed, and a proposal that meets customer's needs is presented. A typical method is variable print. Along with the recent progress in DTP (DeskTop Publishing) technology and the spread of digital printers, variable print systems have been developed, which customize and output a document for each customer. Such a system is required to optimally lay out and display contents in information quantity that changes for each customer.
In a conventional variable print system, containers (also called field regions in a document form) are laid out on a document as regions where pieces of information are displayed. A database and the containers are associated with each other to achieve layout display.
However, each container serving as a partial display region in which a text or image is to be pasted has a fixed size. For this reason, in a case where data in the database is inserted in the container, and the data size is larger than the container size, text overlap or image clipping occurs. If the data size is smaller than the container size, a space is formed in the container. In either case, optimum layout display corresponding to the information amount of a text or image to be displayed cannot be implemented.
To solve this problem, automatic layout systems which change the container size in accordance with the information amount have been proposed. An automatic layout system can flexibly set the container size of a text or image. Some automatic layout systems can set a flexible container size and increase the container size in accordance with the amount of data to be inserted. In another technique, if text data larger than a fixed container size is inserted, the font size of the text is reduced to display the entire text in the container.
However, in a case where the size of a container is increased, it overlaps another container in the document. In a case where the font size is adjusted in text data with a large amount, the font size becomes too small. Another automatic layout technique to solve these problems is disclosed in the “layout design apparatus” of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-316792. In this technique, in a case where the size of a container is increased, the size of another container adjacent to it is reduced.
However, in the above-described automatic layout system, only the alignment technique is taken into consideration, in which the number of lines of a flexible table as an example of a container is increased in accordance with the data to be pasted in the container, and the remaining containers move accordingly. That is, the technique is used to create the layout design of a document in which in a case where the number of lines of the flexible table increases, the remaining containers move accordingly, and page ejection occurs. However, the above-described one-to-one marketing requires to lay out containers in number desired by a user in a page of a predetermined paper size. That is, the conventional technique using the simple flexible tables cannot meet this requirement. There is a demand for an automatic layout system which dynamically lays out a necessary number of containers in a page of a predetermined paper size while inserting data in containers and changing the container sizes. In such an automatic layout system, since all containers have flexible sizes, the layout must dynamically be changed while changing the container sizes relative to each other. To dynamically change the layout, associations (to be referred to as links hereinafter) must be set between the containers. Since a link must be set for each pair of containers, the operation load of the user is large. That is, to lay out a plurality of containers and set to dynamically lay out them, links must be set between the containers. In a case where the number of containers increases, the number of links also increases. The operation load of the user who sets the links increases in proportion to the number of containers.